I heard the scream the night the guests arrived.
So far out in the woods it could have crossed over from some other life into mine, escaped from a stranger’s dream. I was certain I heard it though. Certain I was awake.
It may have started as an attempt at No! before detaching from the word, from language – and then it was done. The sort of thing you could hear through the screened window of a cabin in the middle of the Pacific Northwest rainforest and half-convince yourself, a suburban kid who knew nothing of the woods, that it was the shriek of an animal or bird, some natural thing you lacked the knowledge to identify.
I should have gone to someone right then, or left on the van out in the morning with the other guys who decided to quit or got canned for breaking one of the rules. But the truth is I never had trouble sleeping the whole time I was there. It was like I was mildly drugged, or hypnotized. The insomnia came later.
Now I don’t sleep at all.
* * *
Ty got me the job. He was in my American Lit class sophomore year. Right away he assumed a friendship where none existed. I wouldn’t say I ever liked him, but I got used to him.
So when he came to me in early June talking about a job at a “camp for old dudes” and saying it paid a thousand a week (insane money for the early 90s) I just rolled with it. Ty was vague about how he heard about the gig, saying a “buddy” told him, and I suspected it was a lie. It’s why, when he told me he’d gotten word we were both in, I was surprised it might turn out to be real.
It was called The Sanctuary. I’d never heard of it before but apparently it had been mentioned in the news from time to time over the last century if you bothered to dig around. A thousand acres of ancient forest two hours east of Seattle. Ultra-exclusive, invitation only. A retreat where, once a year, a couple hundred VIPs – billionaires, leaders of government, corporate CEOs, along with a sprinkling of athletes and entertainers and academics – would gather to attend outdoor lectures, put on skits, share the greatness of their thoughts while getting stinking drunk. All of them were men.
We were instructed to gather at the corner of a mall parking lot in Kirkland for the drive to the site. Three buses rolled up. Fancy charters with leather seats and a screen playing a videotape of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. I remember Ty being strained, jumpy. I occupied myself by trying to block him out, giving him one-word answers, pretending to sleep. Looking back on it, I saw how his excitement was actually the worry he was trying to hide.
As soon as we stepped off the bus we were ushered into the dining hall where we were given a non-disclosure agreement to sign. Then the one who was in charge and was referred to only as the Steward gave us a rundown of the rules.
No mail in or out. No phone calls (there was no landline in the staff camp, and our packs were searched to make sure none of us brought a satellite phone, the only thing back then that might have worked out there). There was a curfew of nine o’clock. Violations resulted in dismissal without pay and immediate removal from the property. Contact with guests is to be kept to a minimum.
We had five days of training before the guests arrived. A single path, wide and clear, took us back and forth from our camp to the main compound where the guests slept and had their gatherings. There were a number of other, narrower trails that forked off into the trees in different directions, but we were forbidden from starting down any of them.
Ty and I shared a cabin. After the first couple days there, in the lead-up to what the Steward called the Arrival, I found myself curious about Ty’s impressions of the place.
“Here’s the weird thing,” he said one night. “They’re all super-serious about the privacy of the guests, right?”
“They come here to get away from attention.”
“Right. But what is the Steward most strict about? It’s the woods.”
“How do you mean?”
“The one thing they’re really bent over backwards about is making sure we don’t wander off on one of the trails.”
“So what’s your theory?”
“They don’t want us seeing what they don’t want us to see.”
* * *
The area where the guests stayed was a cross between a scouts jamboree, a five-star restaurant and Disneyland. There was a dining hall much larger than where the staff ate. A pond with the giant sculpture of a grinning child carved out of the remains of an enormous redwood at one end. An amphitheater.
Dotted around these features were a dozen or so wall tents, each with their own canopied picnic table. This is where the guests stayed, each with its own name. Behemoth. Owls Head. Kaleidoscope. One waiter per site. On the morning of the Arrival, I was assigned to Metamorphosis.
They came in limos, Suburbans with blacked-out windows, a rock star who roared up on a Harley. I watched them come. My eight. Some bulging out of Bermuda shorts, legs pale and prickled with hair, spindly arms like toothpicks stuck in a baked potato. Some slight, their movements fussy. All of them heaving themselves up the gentle slope to Metamorphosis as if it was the final ascent on Everest. Except for one.
He was probably the oldest of all of them, but he led the line up to the camp with little effort. The first thing he did was ask my name.
“I’m the Secretary,” he said. “And I could murder a gin-and-tonic.”
I recognized him. Sort of. A white face in a blue suit on the cable news. He was powerful even compared to the enormously powerful men who guffawed and slurred and boasted around him.
The other seven guests kept me running for drinks and platters of charcuterie and King crab legs on ice all that first day. Here again the Secretary was the sole exception. He spoke directly to me, seemed interested in my responses. An attention that wasn’t creepy but was intimate nonetheless. His focus was of a kind that held you, so that you were left with the sense that he knew aspects of yourself far deeper after a single moment than you did, or ever would.
That was the night I heard the scream. In the morning Ty told me he heard it too.
“Why didn’t you say anything last night?” I asked him.
“Because I was scared, man.”
In the evening, after the guests had been served their tasting menu dinners, I returned to staff camp to find Ty wasn’t there. The bag he kept under his bunk was gone too. Ty didn’t tell me he had any plans on leaving. But I had an idea where he’d gone.
He went to look for where the scream came from.
* * *
There was a search. The Steward told me there was, anyway. This happened sometimes. The Sanctuary had a way of exposing the weaknesses in some, as the Steward put it. And once it did, they were gone.
I tried to explain that Ty would be the last guy to make an eight mile hike alone in the dark. This prompted a round of questions about how close I was to him. I lied. Said I barely knew him. Agreed that chances were he was already back home, plastering Lanacane on the mosquito bites he wouldn’t shut up about.
The truth is, I didn’t want to be sent away. One reason was that if Ty had gotten into trouble I could be more useful to him if I stayed on. The other reason was the Secretary and I were becoming friends.
Over the course of days he carved out more of his time and spent it talking with me. It didn’t seem especially odd. This was the point of the Sanctuary, after all. International arms sales? Sure. Skirting anti-trust scrutiny on an unannounced merger? Whatever. But it was also cool if all you wanted to do was shoot the breeze with a nobody lit major.
The Secretary was wise. He knew things. Presidential adulteries, state secrets, how Congressmen were blackmailed into changing their votes. But he knew other things too. Unspeakable things. Observations of human nature most would be destroyed by if they stumbled on them, but not him.
His interest in me was driven by his interest in everything: How could it become part of him? The Secretary didn’t just observe the world. He absorbed it. His cloudy eyes pulling me, the trees, the food on every plate – everything he looked at became his.
I didn’t know all that when he asked me if I had a first love. Sexual feelings but also the broader yearning to “be conjoined with them,” the one I wanted “and would always want.”
For me it was Isobel Turnley. My junior year of high school. She arrived in October from out of town. Redhaired, deep laugh, a boyish body with a womanly mouth. My first.
I told the Secretary all of this and then some. The particulars slipping out in a rush, like having to piss in public and feeling the relief of being emptied out before realizing there’d been someone watching you the whole time.
* * *
When I could, I tried to find out what happened to Ty. I was pretty sure it had to do with the Second Agenda. That’s what one of the guests, drunk, called it when I saw him start off down one of the trails into the woods.
“I’ve been tapped for the Second Agenda,” he said. “And you don’t say no to that!”
Even in his drunkenness he realized he’d said too much. He stumbled into the trees as if he had no choice in it. I kept an eye out for him when he came back. He joined the long, candlelit table in the dining hall a few minutes late. The man appeared to be in a state of surprise, as if grappling with astonishing news.
Only a fraction of the guests ventured onto the trails. Those who did were chosen. I noticed how it was only after speaking with one of the guests who were repeat visitors. The Secretary being one of them.
I knew it was a bad idea to ask him about it. But I owed Ty the effort.
I’d brought the Secretary one of his seemingly random cocktail selections – a Rob Roy – and stuttered out my questions before I had a chance to change my mind. Why did some of the guests go into the forest and others didn’t? What was the Second Agenda? Where was my friend?
“None of what you think matters in fact matters at all,” he said. “Perspective. Have you ever seen a map of Dante’s underworld? His hell? It’s a hole. One with increasing levels of punishment, down and down, narrowing as it goes. But if you turned the map around – changed the perspective – the hole becomes a pyramid. To enter it is no longer a descent into darkness but an ascendance. If you wish to touch the sun you must go all the way to the top. Survey the world as only a god could see it.”
He handed me his empty glass and joined Metamorphosis’ guests. In his absence I tried to collect his remarks in my head. He hadn’t mentioned the woods or a Second Agenda or Ty’s whereabouts. Yet I felt that he’d answered something I wanted to know even more.
* * *
After lights out I left my cabin. There were voices in the fire-dotted darkness of the compound. A drunken holler bouncing off the redwoods. I kept to the treeline. When the first cutaway opened up to my left I slipped into it.
I carried on down the trail. A breeze passed over my face, curling around me, carrying the scent of the ocean though the ocean was too far away. It came to me then: this wind wasn’t the natural movement of air, but exhalations. A living being, unseen but close. Inhuman.
The forest was so black it was absent of even the faintest outline of trees or branches. And then, all at once, lights pushed through them. Yellow fires. Along with portable spotlights of the kind used to make roadside repairs through the night. But there was no road here.
I felt like I was going to be sick. The nausea came with the intuition that whatever the lights and fire were illuminating was unnatural in a way I couldn’t imagine. An indescribable wrongness.
A scream. Followed by another. They faded in volume within moments. It was only after they’d retreated that I realized it was because I had run away from where they were coming from.
* * *
They gave the wait staff a couple hours off between lunch and dinner. That afternoon, the Secretary asked if I would rather spend the time attending some of the Sanctuary’s events with him instead.
Some of it was predictable: stock picks from a “Wall Street wizard,” a Hall of Fame pitcher revealing the best brothels and barbecue in every city he played in. There didn’t seem to be any theme behind the talks, other than what you were hearing was material you wouldn’t hear anywhere else.
As the guests stumbled out of the dining hall after dinner the Secretary invited to stay to watch the Pageant.
“It’s silliness, for the most part,” he said. “But it can sometimes achieve a certain grandeur.”
A frat house musical revue. That was the tone of the thing off the top. Guests singing old college songs and reciting dirty poems. Old white guy bullshit. Yet as the performance went on, it changed. The actors traded their tuxedos for dresses and stuffed bras and lipstick. A drag show. The songs were different now too. An atonal clash of shrieks and grunts.
The ones who were still costumed as men began lifting the skirts of those dressed as women. Around me the audience howled. I looked to where the Secretary had been sitting but he was gone.
The audience bucked and lurched and slapped their own faces. It wasn’t drunkenness. It struck me that they were poisoned, or spellbound. I looked to the stage again. The actors didn’t appear to be pretending anymore, but doing whatever they had been doing for real now. Nobody noticed because the audience gave up watching and started acting in the same ways in the rows of seating. Punches were thrown. Faces willingly offered to be met by fists, begging for pain. There were bodies in other men’s mouths, blood dripping from mouths, screeches of excitement uttered from their mouths.
From across the pond, behind the amphitheater, a fire came to life at the base of the carved tree. The grinning child. Except now, in the licks of flame, it appeared to be snarling.
* * *
I don’t remember side-stepping out from the row where I was seated, crossing the compound and finding the same trail I’d walked down the night before. There was only my being in the one place followed my being in the other.
For a time I just walked in the dark. I couldn’t stay on the trail. There would have to be a security detail out here, watchers of some kind. It was important for me to stay out of sight. At the first glimmer of light ahead I stepped off the trail and worked my way along it in parallel. When I was close enough I crouched down and waited for my vision to make sense of what I could see.
A bush party. Beer coolers, a fire, voices calling out. Grown men – some of the guests – and younger women in equal number. There was music too. “I’m Your Baby Tonight.” The sugary Top-40 on every radio at the time.
The women were prostitutes. Streetwalkers from downtown, plainly wasted. The men were either drinking, or bending over a platter of coke on a table by the fire, or talking with the women as they guided them into the shadows.
The Secretary’s voice returned to me and with it the meaning I’d only partly grasped at the time he spoke them. How the best way to look at the underworld was as a hole in the ground. Because then you could turn it upside down. Where you stop is up to you. A chasm of tortures. A tower of pleasures.
I crawled on hands and knees before getting to my feet. Following the shape of the trail I could sense next to me. It took maybe another hour before more firelight appeared.
A single bonfire at the center of a clearing larger than the bush party’s. A circle of cages on flatbed trailers. Four of them. Looking inward to where the fire had almost diminished to a bed of embers. It reminded me of an image in a book from when I was little. A story about a traveling circus, and this was the illustration of the cages on wheels where the animals were kept at night. Except when I squinted through the iron bars I found people instead.
One per cage. A teenaged boy staring, unblinking, into the firelight. A woman in her late-twenties wearing a filthy Rolling Stones t-shirt. A man the same age as her, sobbing. The last cage was empty.
Other than the fire and the cages there was a military-style medical tent set off in partial shadow. Voices and lights flashed from within. When the flaps opened a pair of men in ski-masks came out. Guns holstered at their waists, their movements sure. Not guests.
They went straight to the cage with the crying man inside. One of the ski-mask men reached inside and grasped the crying man’s ankle before he thumped to the floor and was dragged out in a single pull. The man kept trying to get to his feet even as he was hauled over the ground and into the tent. He started screaming only once he was inside.
I carried on before the masked men could come out of the tent again.
The forest was the same dense life around me – there was no start to it, no end – yet I knew I was going deeper into it. All the way to the top. I had already seen enough to break me. Survey the world as only a god could see it.
It took almost all the rest of the night to come to the trail’s final stop.
Another clearing, bigger than the others combined. Several fires were dotted around its border. It made it difficult to see the people gathered in the center.
Maybe ten, a dozen. All of them in the same Bermuda shorts or golf pants the guests wore around the compound, but now each of them with orange hoods over their heads. The eye holes carefully cut in the shape of stars, the mouths little circles.
They were speaking but not in conversation. A murmuring. The longer it went on I heard it as a recited text but spoken in overlapping voices, a language that may have been English, but arrived to my ears as something other than that. Old, long-forgotten, blasphemous.
My eyes adjusted to the light. The first thing it let me see was the body.
A man bound at the ankles but otherwise free to move, which he did by writhing on the ground. On one of his rollovers his face was directed at me and I saw that it was Ty.
One of the hooded men stepped forward. Went to Ty, bent down, drew a cardboard cutter from his pants pocket and sliced his throat.
My friend made no sound other than a wet hiccupping. A different hooded man came to him. The second man got down on his knees and let Ty’s pulsing blood fill his cupped hands. Then he rose, brought the offering to the man whose back was closest to me, and let him drink.
The speaking stopped. They watched the blood-drinking man double over, stagger, but not fall. He straightened again. Taller by inches than his height of a moment ago. The man pulled off his hood.
Decades had been removed from him, drawn away from his body like a sheet. The Secretary was young now. The same age as me. His hair thick and full, the creases of his face smoothed, his body muscled in the lean way of a swimmer.
I turned to the side and puked out the last three days of everything I’d swallowed in a hot torrent over the ferns.
When I looked back into the clearing a woman stood over Ty’s body. She was unbound, but there was nothing left in her that would allow her to even attempt to run. I recognized something familiar about her. My first thought was that she was from a TV show from when I was a kid, a grown-up child star. A blink and I saw who she really was.
Isobel Turnley. The girl who I’d described to the Secretary, confessed every intimacy about, the most personal being that I would think of her always no matter who I would go on to become. The love of my life.
The Secretary went to her. Held her with his young hands at the tops of her arms. Kissed her with his blood-encircled mouth.
A stillness. I absorbed the moment as the man who kissed Isobel did, and it entered me as a burning stone, an ulcer cutting through my stomach.
The Secretary pulled away from her. Turned to look into the trees at the spot where I was crouched. He didn’t point at my location, didn’t voice a command. But the masked men came for me as if he had.
They weren’t in the clearing but stationed in the trees. They must have been, because they appeared from nowhere.
I found the trail and ran over it into the deeper woods beyond. I ran blind and without pause.
With the dawn came an inkling of direction. A way to the highway. A flagged pickup truck.
They could have found me after that, at any point in the days and years that came after. It would have been nothing for them. I felt sure it was the Secretary who ordered them not to pursue me. Not out of mercy or friendship or anything of the kind. He let me live because I was his.
* * *
When I got back to my apartment I called my mom. At the end she mentioned getting a call out of the blue from another kid’s mom from my high school days. She’d seen something in the news about Isobel Turnley going missing two days earlier.
Mom thought I might be interested to know. Wasn’t she a sweetheart of yours?
* * *
I’m older now. My wife died two months ago. After the funeral my kids promised to visit more but are already inventing the excuses that will let them visit less.
I bought a digital camera. Top of the line, smaller than a pack of cigarettes. It can zoom in on nosehairs from fifty yards off. I’m taking it with me back to the Sanctuary. They still have their gatherings there as far as I know. The super-rich, the starters of wars. People like the Secretary.
I don’t figure on coming back from those woods a second time. And I’m settled on that, I’m good.
My one hope is that I get something on camera first. That it finds its way out to the world. To show how evil is a way of seeing. How deep the hole goes.